The Golden Age

I went through a stage while at Uni when I loved most things that Woody Allen made. I loved the unabashed neurosis of it all, and found myself quoting suitably intellectual or angst-ridden lines well after each viewing. Then I guess it all started to go downhill. I realised that Woody himself was a bit of a pervert, and got sick of films that suggested that no relationship can last and that "the heart has its own reasons" for abandoning one woman for another at regular intervals. Woody and I parted ways a few years ago, and absolutely nothing about "Vicky Christina Barcelona" made me remotely interested in rekindling the relationship.

Then came "Midnight In Paris", a film with so many things independently of Woody to recommend itself that I found it, in the end, irresistible: Owen Wilson; Adrien Brody (playing Salvador Dali); Rachel McAdams; Marion Cotillard; Michael Sheen; Paris; Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dali, Buñuel, Man Ray, T.S. Eliot and Gaughin all featuring as characters; did I mention Marion Cotillard?...I wouldn't be strong enough to pass all this up. And I'm glad I didn't. It was almost certainly enhanced by watching it at the Sun Theatre in Yarraville, one of Melbourne's most iconic theatres in one of its most iconic suburbs. Somehow, walking out of the film into Ballarat St, Yarraville, felt rather like remaining in Paris. It wouldn't have surprised me at all to see Hemingway inviting me into a cab with him.

But what I think I liked most about it was that, while it contained many of the moral issues of a typical Woody Allen film - including a new application of his own reason for leaving Mia Farrow for their adopted daughter - it did not quite linger in the same neurotic space as his films used to. The resolution is still a little idealistic, as if the universe does still somehow conspire to make romantic love always come true, but it was, if possible, a wise, more knowing kind of romanticism that the film's protagonist, Gil, achieves by the film's closing credits.

If there is a message to this film, it is perhaps that there is no such thing as a golden age - that we have always been discontent with our own present, however glorious it might seem to others. I don't know exactly what Woody wants me to make of that message, but I know what I left the cinema wanting to do - to praise God for what I have now, and, just as the apostle Paul taught the church in Philippi to do, to replace anxiety with thankfulness.

To top it all off, it really was just a great film.